Villarreal: City Council will ultimately decide hotel at HemisFair

Chinese lanterns light up the sky during the closing ceremonies for Luminaria 2012 at Hemisfair Park. Billy Calzada/Express-News

Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, posted this response to his HemisFair Park bill on Facebook page on Sunday. It is posted here with permission with from his office.

By Mike Villarreal

When the City of San Antonio asked me to carry legislation to expand contiguous parkland in HemisFair Park, I agreed knowing that this legislation would lead to improved urban living in the core of downtown.

I was eager to help advance our community’s vision for a great urban park surrounded by more urban living downtown, but I wanted to ensure two things would result: (1) a significant increase in contiguous parkland and (2) development around the park would be for locals. This is why the original version of my legislation had a prohibition on hotels within HemisFair Park on land owned by the City.

Unfortunately, this week it became clear to me that the legislation would not pass with the provision banning hotels. The industry group that represents hotels across the state was adamant about not creating a precedent for limiting hotel development in state law. They prefer that decisions like these be left to local city governments.

In my 13 years as a lawmaker, I’ve seen plenty of bills die in the process because of the focused opposition of a single interest group. In fact, the state hotel lobby had already slowed the bill down and was threatening to kill it entirely.

Given the importance of the legislation to those of us who want to advance urban living in San Antonio, I offered a compromise solution that still achieves our paramount goal — parkland must increase — and sets a very high floor for the amount of redevelopment that must serve locals either through residential development or commercial that serves residential development. For those who believe 100 percent of the redevelopment that occurs around the park in HemisFair should be for locals, we still have an opportunity to make our case at the local level in front of City Council, a group of decision makers who ultimately should make the decisions about how San Antonio grows.

Mike Villarreal, a Democrat from San Antonio, serves in the Texas House of Representatives